If this is really so, then this is going to make things much more complicated.

This is purely conjecture. But if it were the case that Kobo changed the hardware without an obvious model number change, then I feel no sympathy for whatever extra returns they might get by people bricking their devices, even though firmwrae sideloading is a little off reservation. (Whatever happened to the tech of the first generatoin kobo's.. as I recall, those were able to boot from SD card. Seems like a sensible failsafe to build into a device, no?)